jueves, 28 de agosto de 2014

A few days ago, I read in El País a remarkable article against the
new political formation Podemos. In this article, the author Antonio Roldán
stated firmly that we can’t associate Podemos
with a serious left-wing political program. Every single measure of this party,
like the 35 work hours per week, the revocation of all the pension reforms, the
ilegalization of laying off workers in profitable businesses, the control of
the European Central bank, or the refusal on repaying the public debt, would
lead us to a deeper crisis than the one that we still are suffering. Instead of
this, the author suggests what a responsible left-wing party should do.

The arguments that the author sets out
for all these critics seem always reasonable and even quite rational, in economical
terms. For instance, it has no sense to refuse repaying the public debt, when
almost every month the Spanish state needs to go to the international markets
and ask for more loans to keep the social services of his impoverish welfare
state. But the problem is exactly this point. It’s useless to show a rational
speech to a party that it’s based on the contrary. Podemos was voted by hope and despair, rage and anger; its
electorate is mainly composed by people who have lost their faith in the
system. So they cannot be convinced by nice words and arguments. They became
too suspicious, after six years of crisis. I think, for instance, how easy
should be to refute the article as a whole. If there are issues that a
responsible left party can do –in a different way than the right positions, no
need to say so- why haven’t they done anything in the last six years? Are
sensible left-wing measures so weak and unpopular that they are not able to
communicate any signs of hope to society?

But we could go further in the
argument of the critics to Podemos.
Even if we endorse the idea that it is not possible another politics than
liberalism and austerity, with all the reasons that any conservative economist
could give us, this would mean very little for this electorate. It doesn’t
matter if in the long run, equilibrium and recovery comes back to economy; the
problem is what will happen meanwhile, and who are going to be the winners in
all the process. The farer the point of recovery is, the less attractive these
politics are. As Keynes suggested once, in the long run we are all dead.
Moreover, the less knowledge we have about the winners in the process, the less
support we’ll have on the potential losers of the whole process. How attractive
can be the idea of extreme austerity, if an important part of the unemployed
will never get a job again? In that instant, rationality disappears in our
social brain. Rationality turns into revenge. More than one will find
attractive the idea of a complete rapture of all privileges, a direct attack on
the system as a whole. They are not thinking any more in the advantages they
get, but in the disadvantages they can cause on their enemies. So rationality
means for them, how much damage I can inflict on the system and the people who
are benefited by it –mainly the casta-,
no matter the cost that it will take for me in the future. For a long time we
have considered democracy choices linked to rationality, common sense and even
social welfare. We can’t make this assumption anymore. Democracy, like in
ancient Athens, or like in the 30s in Germany or Spain, can be dominated by
revenge and death as well.

We can imagine our crisis as the
sinking of a social Titanic. When the
ship is still working, low and high are happy enough to tolerate among them.
But in the sinking, the priviledged are the only enable to reach the lifeboats.
The lower, seen that their salvation is impossible, will choose between two
options, help the priviledges to save their live, or try to kill them as well.
It is not the case of the old man who leaves his seat for a baby in order to
preserve the future; it is the case of an unfair system in which priviledge
people haven’t done too much to deserve the place they have in the lifeboat. In
fact, some of those priviledged people could be seen as outrageous villains
–all the political casta for instance-.
If this tale is true, why are we going to support the politics of the common
sense? What reasons and arguments can the main two parties hold their position?
As we see with fascism and communism, there is beauty in chaos and destruction.
And after wiping out the present, there are always places for new buildings to
rise.

domingo, 24 de agosto de 2014

For some people (and I include
myself among them), there is an uncomfortable feeling in the air when you are
in a meeting with strangers and someone ask politely about your job. Then you
hesitate for a while and your brief answer is: I am a teacher, secondary school
teacher. After that, the following question makes you feel almost embarrassed.
“I am philosophy teacher”, you dare to whisper. If you are of this kind of
philosophers, no doubt that you are under the Wittgenstein’s complex.

This is called to the personal
vision of philosophy defended by this philosopher. Everybody –coming from the
ashamed fields of philosophy- already knows who was this thinker. Wittgenstein
always understood philosophy as a rather useless knowledge, opposite to what
science, and more especificaly, technique could offer to mankind: practical and
useful wisdom, able to change the life conditions and enhance life conditions.
Instead of that, philosophy was some kind of mistake in the human language, a
nonsense jargon, deep questions without any satisfactory answer, but that human
beings were condemned to formulate by some kind of magic spell on our nature.

For Wittgenstein, the abilites of a mason
or a worker in factory are quite superior to all knowledge adquired by
philosophy and pure sciences. It is quite known the anecdote when some of his
best students asked him what study or occupation he should follow. Wittgenstein's answer couldn't be more disappointing: go back to your little town and learn something useful. Brilliant
minds that could stand out in the fields of maths, physics or philosophy should
better be sent to dark factories, in the opinion of Wittgenstein. An average worker who could make simple nuts or screws for a more complex
machines was a real heroe for Wittgenstein, instead of philosophers and matemathicians.

Of course, all the story could be a
complete paradox, and we could accuse Wittgenstein as a complete imposter if he
were not doubting during his whole life about the dignity of being a philosophy
teacher and a thinker himself; more than once he renounced to all conventions
and left his promising scholarship and his job as a university teacher in
Cambridge, becoming a soldier, a primary school teacher, a gardener, a
stretcher-bearer during the war, or even an eremit. But looks are deceiving: we
could object that this continous change of occupations were possible because
Wttgenstein in fact was brought up in one of the richest families in the
Austrohungarian Empire, and we could doubt that he has ever had any real problem
of subsistence.

This
negative vision of philosophy is at odds with Aristotle’s first concept of this
knowledge. The macedonian thinker took philosophy in a very high steem, as a
first science, completly free from any bounds with human needs. That was what
made philosophy a major wisdom: its complete uselessness. Because it was
useless, no tie or bound should be linked with any human need. Therefore, it
was just thinking for the mere pleasure of thinking. The more abstract was the
subject (as metaphysics) the highest and purest. But Aristotle’s society was a
culture where handwork was a slave’s task, and not a noble occupation for free
men. Philosophy meant something more than accuteness or inteligence: it was a
social class symbol, a leisure for rich people.

Too much time have passed from
Boetius, when he stated that philosophy was the only consolation he could
afford in his jail, waiting for an unfair capital punishment, and wrote a
memorable essay where he received the visit of a young lady, who comforted him
in his last hours discussing about good and evil, death and eternal life.

What
happened between Aristotle and Wittgenstein? More than the eruption of science,
it was the emergence of a new concept of work what have condemned philosophy to
ostrascism, as too many other old sacred things. The old sense of nobility is
translated after capitalism in terms of utility. All that once was sacred,
vanished, Marx reminded in the Communist Manifiest. That is why after the
industrial revolution and the fall of the aristocracy feelings in education,
Aristotle’s view started to be seen as shameful.

Even
Wittgenstein was a weird example in his age, when an outstanding and powerful economist
like Keynes still was writting sophisticated ethical works and was a refined
antique collector, and a first range politian as Churchill was educated under
the lectures of Gibbon and was able to write masterpiece books in the field of
militar history. But the world they wanted to control and dominate, had
different rules and they knew that: they saw themselves as a part of a
decreasing intelectual aristocracy, condemned to dissapear in the long run with
other terrible and beatiful things.

And
throughout the wide period between the end of the Great War and the downfall of
Communism, the sacred veil of philosophy vanished. It doesn’t count if this is
the moment where more books and essays on philosophy are written. Philosophy is
out of our lives and our culture, weak, improductive, and in a world
definitively designed for profit in the short term as globalization is, becomes
an imposible task to face. Recent surveys suggested that common people are
unable to stay more than ten minutes thinking about themselves and the goals of
their own lives. How could this task be the main occupation in their existences?
How can current philosophers bear this overwhelming pressure from our own culture?

domingo, 3 de agosto de 2014

For many of our
students, II War World sounds much more familiar than the Great War. There are lots of differences between both
conflicts that explain this fact. First of all, the Second war was a clear
fight between good and evil, a clash of ideologies incapable to coexist
peacefully (and even Spanish civil war may be understood as a prelude in this conflict). Nazism represents
for most of people the incarnation of evil, of human hatred and cruelty
(although this is not the whole scene of the picture, since Communism wasn’t
better).

Secondly,
it seems that the Second was more definitive
than the First. At the outbreak of the war, all politians and militar
staff thought that this should be the definitive war that would solve all the
problems between the European nations, but the fact was that most of the
conflicts that prompted the outbreak of the Great War remained mainly unsolved
after the conflict. Moreover, historians understand the second war as a
continuation of the former. In opposition to this, a new age starts after 1945,
in which Europe is going to lose his preminence in geopolitics forever, and
becomes merely a stage in the confrontation of the new two supreme world powers,
USA and URSS.

Finally
the inner history of the Second War seems more attractive to study. The blitzkrieg was more brilliant than
trench warfare. Strategist like Rommel, Montgomery or Patton are much known
than the Great War dark generals, stuck in a old fashioned way of warfare and
unable to understand the impact of technology in the frontline. Undecisive bloody
battles were fought for five years in the Great War, meanwhile the II WW
campaigns were dynamic and seemed that any of them could change the tide of war
and the winner side. From 1915, soldiers in the frontline stopped to understand
what they were fighting for and despair and nonsense started to spread out.
Existentialism had its origins in the trench warfare and pacifists started to
rise their voices in opposition to war, like Russell in the UK. Only Americans
could think that they were fighting for freedom when they joined war in 1917
for different reasons than Europeans did in 1914. In the Second, from the first
day till the last bullet was shot, people were fighting for ideas or they were
made to believe that.

But
these assessments could lead us to a serious mistake: to consider that current
and future wars are more similar to the IIWW and not like the Great War.
American society tends to judge any war in terms of good and evil; fairness and
mischief. It worked in the beginning of the Cold War, but it was soon revealed
that it wasn’t a mere conflict of ideologies but of interests and power.
Nowadays, holy wars against terrorism are always tainted by economical and
geopolitical interests (oil and Israel mainly). The main reasons in our present
conflicts are just greed from one or both sides, and the faint moral advantage
that one side can offer from the other, is its own weakness (as it happens in
the Palestinian conflict, for instance). Tucydides was right, almost 2500 years
ago, when he assured that the origin of most wars relies on too much power in
one side, and fear of that growing power on the other. Athens was too ambitious,
and Sparta too scared, so after all diplomacy failed, war started.

These
circumstances were present in the first worldwide conflict,

as it’s perfectly
showed in the works of Margaret MacMillan in The war that ended peace. The Great War was a scary addiction of
greedy selfish interest, suspicion from all sides, plus enormous
miscalculations, and these conditions make the conflict more interesting to
learn, especially in the previous period to the war, where complex reasons created an unbreathable
atmosphere that ended in a shared war declaration. It’s extremely hard to find
good reasons that enable to legitimate one of the fighting sides from the
other. Some could say that the Triple Entente was fighting for democracy, but
it wasn’t since Russia was on this side. For British and French, political and
economical purposes easily banned any kind of moral biases against the Russian
autocracy. This changed a little bit, since Russia left war after the
bolquevis¡h revolution and America entered in the conflict due to the German
terrorist attacks against neutral ocean liners like Lusitania, but for then, all moral superioriy had disappeared in
both sides.

But
what made IWW an exception from all the previous conflicts were the terrible
miscalculations from all the political and military elites. There were two main
mistakes: a diplomatic one and other based in the proper warfare. Politics in
the previous years of war was becoming more and more intrigating and
destructive. Elites of different powers were playing a complex chess game,
where little countries were considered as pawns, and often changed alliances in
order to fulfil their national interests. In addition to this, political game
was only played inside the government offices and Royal palaces of Europe with
little regards for transparency and public information. This
led to four crisis at least in ten years, that could end in a war outbreak,
mainly centered in the Balkans and Morocco. It was just a question of time that
military conflict should emerge, and all the countries were getting prepared for
this unpleasant context.

The
second miscalculation came from the impact of technology and industrial society
in the manners of warfare. All the countries thought that war would last only
for a few months, consisting in a brief and powerful military campaign where the
enemy should be overunned or vanquished. Nobody expected that trench warfare
came out, and technology created an impasse that would last four bloody years.
And of course, nobody could imagine that fighting for trifles, they would
lose everything in the end of the conflict.

All
these sound familiar for the present. Conflicts are getting more difficult to
discern in moral terms (the “good side” promptly disappears), increasingly
being a fact of power, and mistakes are in the order of the day. Just taking
the example of the Ukraine crisis, the destruction of the civil aircraft in the
hands of one of the sides in war was an unexpected fact in the conflict, with
unknown consequences for the conflict. And unfortunately, these unpredictable
consequences are paid with civilian and
innocent blood.